The Mad Men theory of drunk decision-making

In electing this government, we seem to have picked the worst of both worlds: higher taxation combined with austerity in the public finances. The one bonus I had hoped to see from a left-wing regime was a healthily indulgent approach to spending. Instead we get a Chancellor of the Exchequer who is a former Bank of England economist. Voting Labour and getting a neo-liberal Chancellor is like going on a Club 18-30 holiday and bringing your parents along. It defeats the purpose of the exercise.

In 2012 the Nobel Prize-winning economist Richard Thaler complained: ‘As a general rule, the United States government is run by lawyers who occasionally take advice from economists. Others interested in helping the lawyers out need not apply.’ Here we have a country that is literally run by a lawyer being advised by an economist. The effect of this un-holy alliance will be for government to continue in its present default-mode whereby its energies are devoted to the two things large institutions resort to when they run out of ideas: arse-covering (law) and penny-pinching (economics). Both approaches are like catnip to the bureaucratic mind, since they allow the pen-pusher to delegate every decision to a spreadsheet or an external legal opinion, hence avoiding subjective judgment, which may expose you to blame. Economics and law are two major enabling forces in allowing people to make a seemingly unassailable decision without actually deciding anything at all.

It is this unholy alliance, not migration, that has most contributed to the rise of ‘popularism’: a not unnatural aversion to having decisions about your life taken by people in thrall to mental models at several removes from reality. Migration is one of many crunch-points between common sense and bureaucracy, when people reasonably wonder why the Royal Navy is power-less in the face of six Albanians in a rubber boat.